Inheritances

Thanks to Jared Bernstein for alerting me – us – to a speech
delivered by Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University, Chief
Economist at the World Bank, Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury and, mostly recently
the director of the National Economic Council. At a recent conference sponsored
by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Summers expounded on the ongoing,
mystifying obsession with a deficit that is falling. He said in part:

Somehow, the people who are worried about the
deficit think that they’ve got some kind of monopoly on morality in terms of
the way we care about our children. I’m here to tell you that from the point of
view of my children I am a lot more worried about bequeathing them no
investments in the advancement of science, bequeathing them a vast bill for
deferred maintenance, bequeathing them a starved public sector that no longer
functions because of attrition of all the most able civil servants, than I am
bequeathing them paper debt that’s accumulating interest at less than 1 percent
in real terms.